November 11, 2017

Today people find themselves bombarded with ideas, images, and characters from every kind of media. Game manufacturers quickly capitalize on that phenomenon by producing classic games licensed for popular themes. For Yankees fans, New York Yankees Monopoly makes a great gift. Instead of properties, gamers buy and trade team players while circling the game board as a catcher’s mask or a World Series trophy. Tired of the classic Game of Life? Try Game of Life: My Little Pony. What about card games? Play Pirates of the Caribbean or Sock Monkey Uno. But in my opinion, the board game Clue lends itself best to licensed board game variants, because players take on the roles of Clue’s own cast of characters. And these characters, it turns out, are easily layered with other roles from popular media.

Part of Clue’s fun is assuming the identities of Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, Mrs. Peacock, and the rest, all the while suspecting—in the spirit of the game—that one of your group has committed a murder. But imagine you’re a fan of Alfred Hitchcock films. In the licensed 1999 version you can play Miss Scarlet as Melanie Daniels from The Birds, and kill with a necktie, as in Frenzy, at the Bates Motel from Psycho. Today you can play as Link in Legend of Zelda Clue, kill with a poisoned doughnut or a slingshot in The Simpsons Clue, or discover a murder in the cantina while playing Clue: Star Wars. This 2016 version features a detailed 3-D Death Star game board, praised by fans of the film and the game alike. Many themes, such as Harry Potter Clue, and Scooby Doo, Where Are You! Clue, lend themselves readily to the game’s whodunit framework. Others, such as Clue: Family Guy Collector’s Edition and Clue: Juicy Couture seem less likely. But, they exist.

October 12, 2017

What makes a game classic? Part of the answer is longevity. Most people consider chess classic; we’ve played it for centuries. What about playing cards? Woodblock-printed cards appeared during China’s Tang dynasty (618–907), while written rules for card games were first seen in15th-century Europe. Another characteristic of classic games is continued popularity. Games such as Monopoly in the 1930s and Scrabble during the 1950s broke sales records at first. But they continued to sell in the years that followed and do so today. Like chess and playing cards, these games are now available in electronic formats, but people still enjoy the tabletop versions. In the spirit of those other famous games, I’d like to propose the tile game Mahjong as a potential classic.

Mahjong’s roots reach back to China’s invention of playing cards. Early Chinese card illustrations represented amounts of money—as in gambling. Mahjong relates to a series of draw-and-discard card games in which players try to collect sets, or melds, of identical or related cards. The game rummy also makes use of this mechanic. Sometime in the middle 19th century, bone or bamboo tiles got substituted for the cards in this game. In Asia the tiles are thick enough to stand on end, so players easily conceal their hands; Westerners use thinner tiles on racks. The game caught on and made its way to Europe in the late 19th century and to America by 1920.

June 2, 2017

In 2015 David Howe, an avid chess enthusiast in Rochester, donated 40 different variations of chess sets to The Strong’s permanent collection. Howe’s gift included 4-Way Chess for four players, 3 Man Chess in the Round, Grand Chess, Knightmare Chess, and Stealth Chess to name just a few. A chess purist might ask, why tamper with a classic? But within his donation, a chess set caught my eye and attracted other museum staff members’ attention: The Official Star Trek Tridimensional Chess Set.

Maybe you remember seeing the game in the second episode of the original Star Trek series, titled “Charlie X,” which concerns a human boy with extraordinary mental powers. Captain Kirk called checkmate while playing against Mr. Spock (a move later declared impossible because Kirk was already in check) and Spock characteristically replied, “Your illogical approach to chess does have its advantages on occasion, Captain.”

January 6, 2017

The Strong’s board game collection is unique in all the world. Unlike specialized collectors, the museum thinks broadly about what it acquires, striving to represent both ancient and modern examples, simple games and complex ones, and extremely typical editions and rare versions for the varieties of play they represent, as well as the cultures that inspired them. So I was delighted earlier this year when Don Lyon of Binghamton, New York, offered the museum the opportunity to select from his collection of board games dating from about 1950 to 2000. I ultimately chose more than 75 games from a much larger list. The donation helps fill gaps in the collection for that era, and it also includes several treasures.

One game that stands out in the collection is a 1982 board game inspired by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Blade Runner was not officially licensed through its namesake film’s producers. Therefore, due to copyright and trademark law, the board game was pulled from store shelves soon after introduction, making it nearly impossible to find today. Meanwhile, Blade Runner’s ever increasing cult status—it led the way for so-called neo noir films and helped create the science fiction tech noir genre—has made the scarce board game even more desirable over the years.

November 11, 2016

In the 1970s, a group of gaming friends added the concept of role-playing to the previously straightforward play of war games. Gamers Gary Gygax and his associate Jeff Perrin published instructions for Chainmail, a medieval war game, in 1971. This game differed from all other published war games by including a fantasy supplement based in part on the increased cultural interest in the works of fantasy authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan series. Chainmail’s publishers, somewhat defensively, wrote, “Special features include rules for jousting wizards, trolls, hobbits and (why not) dragons, among others.”

Before 1971, Gygax was a member of the Castle and Crusade game society, which utilized his medieval setting, the “Great Kingdom,” for war games. Fellow gaming enthusiast Dave Arneson joined the society and developed a modified city and castle scenario within that setting. When Chainmail was published, Arneson used those rules for a modified campaign as a Chainmail variant, which included a dungeon of several levels beneath the castle. And Gygax, playing Arneson’s game, enjoyed it so much that he asked Arneson to write down the rules for him. Working with approximately 20 pages of notes from Arneson, Gygax tried, in 1973, to put the game instructions and layers of complexity in layman’s terms and in the process developed the outline for Dungeons & Dragons.

May 17, 2016

The Strong not only collects playthings, but also acquires significant material related to the invention, manufacture, and use of those playthings. One of the museum’s treasures is the collection of games, game prototypes, and archives from noted American game inventor and historian, Sid Sackson. Sackson (1920–2002) is revered among inventors, collectors, and serious players for his lifelong dedication to games and the gaming world.

Sackson designed several games for the influential series known as 3M bookshelf games. The most recognizable of these, and one of his best-known games, is the financial game Acquire, first published in 1964. The Strong holds many examples of Acquire from the first edition to the latest. The museum’s collection also features dozens of other games invented by Sackson and published for markets all over the world. This includes many versions of Can’t Stop, another favorite among serious gamers, and other 3M titles such as Monad and Sleuth. Recently Sackson’s family donated contemporary reissues of many of his popular games, including Acquire and Can’t Stop.

November 24, 2015

When Twister’s three developers brought the concept to game publisher Milton Bradley in 1966, the firm agreed, initially, to manufacture the game. All it took was a demonstration of the play and they were persuaded. Twister’s play was simple and innovative. It had few rules, and never before had a boxed game’s players served as the playing pieces. But the public, at first, seemed tentative about the game. We know, today, that every game of Twister can cause peals of laughter on all sides. But just before the holidays that year, Sears, Roebuck & Co., one of the nation’s major retailers, refused to offer the game in its annual catalog. Sears found the idea of players of both sexes in such close contact too new and too risqué. I’m guessing that, unlike the team at Milton Bradley, nobody at Sears saw an actual game played. The retail giant disliked the idea of the game—and that put Milton Bradley in a (pardon the pun) spot.

We know now that Milton Bradley took Sears’s announcement seriously and stopped the game’s production. But a PR firm had placed the game in the lineup for Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show before the show got news of the game’s cancellation. Carson played the game with his guest, the lovely actress Eva Gabor. The audience roared with show-stopping laughter thanks to Carson’s well-timed facial expressions, Gabor’s exotic Hungarian accent, and her low-cut dress. The bit was hilarious and flirtatious, but not scandalous. The next day every copy of Twister flew off the shelves of the one store which stocked it. And Milton Bradley quickly resumed production. Twister proved a runaway success and has sold well ever since—all it took was a demonstration.

August 12, 2015

The list of Academy Award nominees for 2015 included The Imitation Game, the highest-grossing independent film of the previous year. The film tells part of the life story, with plenty of artistic license, of England’s Alan Turing. Most famous for playing a key role on the top secret team that solved Nazi Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, Turing (1912–1954) was also recognized as a pioneering computer scientist, a mathematician, a logician, a philosopher, and a marathon runner. He devised a test, now known as the Turing Test, to define a standard for a machine to be called intelligent. That test is still widely discussed, championed, and challenged among scholars, and still in use in multiple applications. And it is based on the results of a game—“the imitation game.” If alive today Alan Turing would be called, I’m convinced, a consummate gamer. While serving as a codebreaker at the Bletchley Park mansion, now a museum devoted to the codebreakers, Turing heard about a Monopoly game board specially designed by William Newman, his mentor’s son. Handmade boards and games were more common during the years of the Great Depression and wartime. But Newman’s board incorporated local features and a special diagonal path through the middle. Turing raced to the Newman home to play the game but he lost to the much younger player. Newman recounted later how he’d played many other games, such as chess, against Turing. Turing always won—even when he played chess blindfolded, envisioning the moves in his head. But Monopoly’s dice were not so lucky for Turing that day. The 2012 Alan Turing Edition Monopoly game includes a small reproduction of William Newman’s game board as well as a transcript of his handwritten rules. The game itself incorporates many of the place names and details from William’s board, but it also carries other facts gleaned from milestones in Turing’s career and a narrative of historic details taken from his writings and interviews with his friends.

March 30, 2015

The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong inducted Scrabble in 2004. Since then we’ve made efforts to collect many different versions of the famous “scrambled word game.”

Oldest

Visit The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame web page for Scrabble, and you’ll learn that unemployed architect Alfred M. Butts invented the game during the Great Depression. Butts first called his game Lexico, and later Criss Cross. The Strong holds one of very few known copies of the Criss Cross game board. Butts employed a blueprint method and then glued the paper print onto cardboard. Any player will note the similarity to today’s Scrabble board. Butts—who retained his patent and earned royalties on every set sold afterwards—sold the production rights to James Brunot, who tweaked the rules and changed the name to Scrabble. Sales dribbled along until the president of Macy’s discovered the game in 1952. Other stores quickly followed and by 1953 Brunot couldn’t produce enough games to satisfy the demand. Scrabble has sold steadily ever since.

November 17, 2014

Initially known as the Magic Cube, today’s Rubik’s Cube—a six-sided puzzler that has challenged several generations—holds the title of best-selling toy of all time. Along with bubbles and little green army men, Rubik’s Cube is one of the 2014 inductees to The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame. I first tackled the cube in the early 1980s during the initial craze. I solved about one and a half sides and then gave up. However, in the process, I discovered that solving the cube had to involve a systematic series of repeated patterns. But like many casual puzzlers, I found that utilizing a pattern to solve a side seemed to undo the progress I’d made on a different side. Puzzlers more serious than I found ways to systematically manipulate the cube in serial patterns without disrupting progress already made—and to backtrack to repair previously-solved sides.

Solvers call themselves cubers, and these pattern systems are algorithms. In mathematics, an algorithm is a series of defined tasks, such as equations, used to arrive at a predictable result. Cubers have defined shorthand ways to name each side—and indeed each mini-cube within a side—and write out algorithms to solve the multi-colored conundrum. If it sounds like serious math, it is. Rubik’s Cube demonstrates mathematical group theory, meaning that cubers use formulas within well-defined subgroups through increasingly difficult levels. We may not all understand this math, but a computer does—which is why computer-controlled “hands” can solve the puzzle faster than humans. Thus far, anyhow.

Speedcubing (or speedsolving) is now officially recorded by the International Cube Association (ICA). And small local competitions follow the ICA’s rules. As of 2014, 19-year-old Mats Valk of the Netherlands held the speedcubing record for a single solve at 5.55 seconds. The ICA also keeps records on solves involving the best average out of five attempts, blindfolded (with a visual review beforehand), multiple blindfolded (a series of cubes to solve), fewest moves, one-handed, and solving with one’s feet. Other non-sanctioned events include fastest solve underwater on one breath and fewest possible moves—in which the contestant has one hour to solve the cube and then must write it as an algorithm.

August 29, 2014

Today gamers often seem immersed in their favorite games. But serious, focused gaming is nothing new. Just after the turn of the 20th century, many Americans concentrated and deliberated in a similar manner trying to assemble the latest plaything for adults and families—jigsaw puzzles.

Historically, jigsaw puzzles originated in Europe during the 18th century, when mapmakers and printers glued pictures to wood, and then cut pieces by hand. Beginning as teaching tools for children, puzzles became a staple of early childhood education and entertainment. Many factors contributed to the brief craze for hand-sawed wooden jigsaw puzzles in the early 1900s, but it was limited to people with money because the first adult puzzles were too expensive for most working-class Americans.